Ghosts in the River.

J. L Borges. Frank Hebert. William Gibson. Christopher Marlowe. Orson Scott Card. Neil Gaiman. Arthur Miller. Aescylus. Philip K. Dick. Rudyard Kipling. W.B. Yeats. George R.R. Martin. J.R.R. Tolkien.

What do all of these people have in common?

Not a lot.

They all spent a life putting words on the page. That by itself doesn't impart a kinship.

One aspect of writing that's always stymied me is research. If you want to study a topic, you logically read everything associated with that topic. But if you begin to invest yourself in fashioning a world or a character, you sometimes find that the map charting your way is just too damn vague. Who do you go to to ratchet your imagination into kink? Lots of writers can look back and know who it was that made them want to write. I can't. There are writers who made deep impressions on me at one time -- most of the names on the list above would fall into that category -- but there's no one author who made me think once, "yeah, I wanna do that, but better." Or different. Or something.

And yet when I think of the word "influence", I think of a glut of images, phrases, cross-currents of story and nuance and caves of meaning. Okay. So far, so good. And creativity isn't math. That's a given. Okay. But everyone who does this still has had to seek out the node between the writers who helped give imaginative birth to them, to you, to me, and the ideas of one's own that grow into stories that leave the author's hand as expression for someone else to glut their imagination on. And the other bitch about writing something into being is -- get this -- you have to use words. These endless puzzle-boxes of immediacy and atavistic abstraction, of objected intimacy and, sometimes, simple bloody truths... these radio waves floating between the aisles at Barnes and Noble.

(Well, that's one of the other bitches about writing. The other other bitch about writing is that you can't ask these guys how THEY did it, cuz, check it out, they're dead. Well, you could ask Gaiman and Martin. Actually, you could just ask Gaiman. Martin blogs about football.)

And the other-to-the-third bitch about writing (Other-Cubed) is that you need a clean, well-lighted space to do it in. So there's all this STUFF that goes into the pot as it simmers before anyone else even SEES the product. And when they DO see it, it's a meal for them to savor that you had weeks ago, or months, or years.

True? True. Yet one mark of successful writing is how well the author has played that shell game between self and content and style and audience. Mystical -- not nebulous. Intimate -- not neurotic. Cool -- not too cool.

Shall we illustrate? With GRRM's (to the fanboys) long-overdue A Dance With Dragons out in July and the HBO adaptation on, I've spent some time thinking about the series recently. I'll always prefer Martin's series to Robert Jordan's equally popular Wheel of Time books (and to stuff like Terry Goodkind that just seems second-rate): both series are epic, but Jordan eschewed style for function. Whereas Martin, in three out of four books so far, nine out of ten geeks agree, has drawn up a river in which you can float downstream, looking at the clouds and seeing all your favorite shapes in them. (The fourth book is A Feast for Crows, which sucked. I'll have more to say on this in July.)

And so Martin, who began A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991 because he wanted to write something "huge and totally unfilmable" is getting his story filmed. The chance of Wheel of Time ever showing up on small screen or large? Almost nil. Unless Radiohead does the music, fahgettaboudit.

It looks like what I'm really talking about here is irony. Something seems to mean something but it really means something else. This can happen for a couple reasons:

A) It's what you want to have happen.

B) Two roads diverge in a wood. You take the one you hadn't planned on.

C) Some impulse buried inside your idea claws around like the Alien Queen and makes you want to be perverse. Sort of like the one Pixies song everyone knows because they put it at the end of Fight Club.

There's a thicket of motivation to weed and sort through around this phrase, and yeah, some writers spend a life sorting it. Kafka being the archtype. This didn't make him the life of the party. (Actually, he demanded that all of his writing be destroyed after his death. His publisher decided otherwise.)

And so it's fair to say that Kafka's ghost would be just as or more tormented by the fact that we read him than the man ever was. Disturbing! I'll sign off on that note.

St. Ives Syndrome: Reflections and a Possible Diagnosis.

A yoga class is different things, depending on the teacher and the size of the group. Sometimes a reflective monologue, sometimes a story, sometimes a hip, nature-based rant. At Yoga to the People on St. Marks Place in downtown Manhattan, which runs on donations and offers just the one Power Vinyasa class eight times a day to a packed room of fifty-odd people, they tend toward the last option and the message leans to: "do what you want, whoever said you had to listen to me, but keep breathing or you're not doing yoga anymore and you need to get that stance even again, honey..." however the word-stream might vary, the delivery is always slippery-smooth. Yoga teachers are to America now what card dealers once were: host and judge at the same time. And just as at the card table, no one ever breaks the host's practiced patter: "That hand's doing absolutely nothing; it's sort of this alien hand, right? So make a choice and commit to that choice..."

Outside the studio you're a block down from the Astor Place 6 subway, on a two-block stretch where any night of the week you'll see the refracted prism of a vision thirty years old. I'm struck by it anew every time I open the door to leave: upscale Asian restaurants, check -- karaoke bar, two-story with a large screen upstairs visible from the street, flashing a film of what looks to be Japanese Go-Go dancers circa 1965, check. Mandala Tibetan Store. Whatever Tattoo. Pinkberry. Pho 32 & Shabu Noodle and Shushi, Qui Gong-acupuncture on a second-floor landing with a cheap sign and the lights out. Half a block down to a mega-sized window display of the latest Halo shooter. Strolling musicians in saris with tiny cymbals; a wizened man in sunglasses on the violin taking "aid for Japan". Two half-drunken Chinese in need of shaves stumbling away from the harsh fluorescents of the sub-street level grocery, leaning into each other, punctuating their camaraderie on each syllable: "there was no way... I didn't know a nice ass like that..." They wander away down the sidewalk strafed with dancing neon from each eatery, past 2011 Vespas and Ferraris purring the other way, their acceleration disquieting, as cars made of money always are when you really look at them.

Around the corner are the ripped, geodesic domes of Cooper Union; the subway's lately had a Jimi Hendrix lookalike and masked, blackwear mimes using that one Michael Jackson song from Rush Hour.

Every time, down on St. Marks Place, I look around for the 100-foot screen with the Geisha smiling as the cops' hovercar flies by: it's the opening shot of Blade Runner, and it's right there, every time.

But there's more going on than my geeked-out awe at how urban evolution brought the shadowpunk dream to life and no one noticed. There's this: to whatever degree you can feel non-human in a large city, as if you were never born but just popped into view along a concrete path dotted by telephone poles and graphic designers and brisk waiters, you can feel it here. It's a feeling anyone can recognize -- it's as old as this country's rush to power. In New York, you can't get away from it. I don't quite have the language for it; you might need an alphabet that goes past Z just to begin.

On the way to St. Ives...

It's a precarious vantage point to write from.

What is it in our minds or souls that filters our experience into sense? What's the nature of the solvent that makes a stranger into a friend, a friend into a soulmate, a soulmate into a stranger, like a dance partner it's time to let go of?

On the way to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives...

A few years ago I had a friend I'm not going to name here: we'll call her Sarah. Sarah had been coping with bulimia since she was sixteen; more than half her life, when I met her. She weighed less than eighty pounds but her self-image told her she was elephantine. She'd recently broken up with a boyfriend of ten years and was living on an apple every couple days in a barren apartment. When I left Oakland for New York, she was living out of her car. She had about her an unhealthy intensity that makes perfect sense for someone who's been throwing up for eighteen years.

I spent a lot of time with her over several months, because I'm enough of a reprobate misfit myself that the friendship worked, and because I was afraid she'd just up and check out of this life if someone wasn't taking the ride with her.

It was the only time I've ever seen this particular form of self-mutilation up close. I got the impression that bulimia is just what it looks like: a FUCK YOU that brooks no comeback. A body worker to whom I explained her situation told me that once an eating disorder's been in place for a few years, it's almost impossible to treat, because it's ingrained in the system: the aching and craving for something isn't just physical or physiological: it's spiritual. Sarah would say, often, that she didn't belong in this world, with a kind of fierce despair that always made me feel that she'd earned the right to say this, to mean it. To seek it: something else. Another life.

Her case was unusual, of course: her family had never accepted that she had a real disorder needing real treatment. ("Isn't it time you just got a job?" Et cetera.) Sixteen years in, with no support network and no learned skills to fall back on... of course she was consumed by paranoia. Wouldn't you be?

To reside that far away from the rest of life and not be dead takes some serious willpower. We'd sit in a park all day, talking; she'd lie in the grass, smoking while ants crawled over her. ("Dude, there's ants crawling on you." "Love me, ants! Bless me and ravish my body!") Or she'd lie on the sidewalk with the same result.

Our friendship ended badly. She sent a long, chatty email, opening with "say hi to New York! I'll probably be dead soon..." and I reacted the way commonsense dictated. And then life went on. As you might expect, she does not have a perky Facebook account adorned with pictures. I never knew if she lived or died. She most likely would rather I never said a word about her to anyone, ever again. Let alone this.

On the way to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks.

New York is the home of Paul Auster, who I've written about before: a writer I once idolized, inasmuch as you can idolize someone who writes pitch-black stories about loners. He built a career, first in poetry, then novels, out of his own kind of self-mortification: an endless paring away of everything clumsy, of trying to hit the essential something, the intangible perfection of a phrase or scene, always just out of reach. The people in his imagination are always barely there, forever on the verge of disappearing, locking themselves up in dark rooms to become stones that think and never coming out again, or coming out baroquely disturbed; pathologically magnified with nightmarish, breathtaking grandeur into Stay-Puft Marshmallow Men of crazy.

Every sack had seven cats.

And I guess the sticking point for me about Sarah is that I could have lived where she lived. Auster's one of those writers that believes that when you write, you take whatever really happened and appropriate it for your own use anyway, stacking memory on memory until the truth, the real event, the way things happened is long since gone. 

Every cat had seven kits...

When you choose to persist in putting words on the page simply because you want to write, you always touch the vanishing spiral. You choose to go in, and then you choose to wander. Or you choose to let it go and return. But everyone who's ever seen their own personal, potential Don Quixote in their mind's eye has made these choices. 

And these choices, quite simply and profoundly, change you.  I don't know if many of us understand that, these days. 

Then again, neither did Quixote.

Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?

Only one, of course.  The only one going to St. Ives is the one who tells you the story. 

I've seen two productions of Twelfth Night this year.  Feste, the singing clown, speaks some of the finest lines that the author ever set down about words and thoughts.

A little while ago, the world begun...

With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain...

A foolish thing was but a toy...

And the rain it raineth every day...

It's all just clever nonsense, of course.

Belief

Tolstoy said it, it's famous enough:

"All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its' own way."

Looks good, right? Makes for a good opener in a piece of fiction: looks profound, looks firm. The truth as I'm aware of it is closer to this: every unhappy family is unhappy in ways that almost invisibly marginalize the problems lying there in plain sight, year after year, until all that remains is the impulse to spit, kick, shrug or ignore. As I write that, I feel like I'm about to launch into some bizarre episode about inbred rednecks in the Appalachians, Jerry Springering their way toward a shotgun murder on the front lawn, as deliciously dank and overripe as a two-week old melon. But I'm not. I'm talking about my own blood.

My parents were New York Jews who settled in Connecticut in the latter part of the 1970s, which is when they had me. Nothing out of the ordinary there. What was perhaps a little weird was the religious choice they'd made a few years before: they'd both converted -- mom first, dad sticking around for her when they started dating -- to Nicherin Shoshu of America, later known as Sokka Gakkai International. This is a practice that falls inside the umbrella of what we call Buddhism, but bears little likeness to what most people would associate with Buddhism: no meditation, no contemplation, no focusing on the breath, no walks taken in silence. Just chanting.

A bit of context: you're five, and the grown-ups say to you: "Right. Sit here and repeat these phrases out loud, over and over." The words are incomprehensible: they're Japanese, not that you have any idea what Japanese is, yet. You're at this for half an hour or more, each day. Judging from how they do it, the faster you chant this stuff, the better; the louder, the better. Both of them chant the chant with a fanatical, merciless devotion, seemingly trying to murder something an inch or two in front of their faces with the sound. They also, just to stretch the cult metaphor a bit further, hand out pamphlets in the streets, perhaps more innocently but no less single-mindedly than the Scientologists will be doing a few years later.

One truth about early religious indoctrination: it never leaves you. These days I'm in New York City: in Union Square, where I like to watch the speed chessers doing their thing, it's a block down to the NYC SGI Culture Center: a four-story affair where at most hours of the day, the sound of nam-myoho-renge-kyo wafts out from within. The staffers are unnaturally cheery: instantly ready with a hearty hello, are you a member, would you like to become a member - today? Do you know of the Gohonzon and the wisdom of President Ikeda? Since the break with the Priesthood in the early nineties, when NSA became SGI, the urge to convert has been officially tamped down on, but talk with any SGI rep and you can feel it: shakabuku, the bringing of more into the fold, runs too deep to go away. Some will ask. Some will shrug and give you a "hey, it works for me" and zip away much too briskly. One of these two things will happen inside of thirty seconds, guaranteed. One member I argued with a few years ago in San Francisco, when I still argued with members, wrapped things up by telling me, "well, you know, we're all just going to live and die and hopefully not starve too much in-between..." while glazed over, checking out the buffet.

I rarely go into the Culture Center. It's always there, nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Always, just a block down the alley, a few steps from the Barnes and Noble where I spent a weekend homeless, once, when I was eighteen, as intimate, as eerily familiar and as unwanted as a creepy old uncle, slapping too many backs at the barbeque, telling too many abrasive jokes, staring a little too hard at your cousin who just got her first period. It's common in SGI to refer to those born into the practice as "fortune babies". No one has called me this in a long, long time. Anyone who did, and meant it, would probably lose teeth.

Here and now, in 2011, both parents still practice. Mom does so with a sense of humor: dad, with an empty, terrifying fervor, identical to that with which he sat me down in 1983 and told me to change my karma. ("What's karma?" "DO IT.") Unchanging, year after year. His speech is peppered with "determinations" and "fortunes" and karmic hesitations between words, and sometimes it's charming, in a childlike way. He claims at times to be dying of something: I asked once, got a "you have no idea what I'm going through" and dropped it there. He will sometimes email me Ikeda's Daily Wisdom or syrupy stories of people who beat cancer. These mostly get deleted unread. When he types, he can't seem to spell, and he will invariably and mystifyingly use the letter "U" for the word "you" when emailing me, like a drunk teenager texting. "Sending u all good wishes for better times, I know u are doing your best." -sent from my Blackberry.

So finally I commented on the "u" thing. "I send to you my heartfelt wishes while having to type with my thumbs, and in return I get a sneer and the back of your hand? Go fix yourself and don't write back." -sent from my Blackberry.

I asked if his best wishes were really Twitter-length. This kicked off a long diatribe where I was told among other things that "your protestations of innocence rang hollow fifteen years ago", that I was "pretending that your own soul is not torn by the strife u are causing" and "keep it up and u will be the smugest son of a bitch in that graveyard we are all destined for", in-between alternating bouts of self-pity and condescension, and reflections on his misfortune at not being able to express the torrent of love within.

When he got to the reflective part, all toddled out in words a lot less genuine than a greeting card, and finally started in on telling me that I should "show me how u express your caring and concerned thoughts for me, so that I can read your language and emulate it", I explained, without a trace of humor for him to misinterpret, that trying to force concern out of me was manipulative, it didn't make me want to open up the floodgates and I didn't care that he couldn't stop judging himself and psych guilt-tripping.

This was last week. I was in the middle of school finals, trying to make something sound good in Pro Tools, and looking for a new apartment. I didn't pay much attention to any of this as I read it. I just told him why I didn't like him, and then told him more thoroughly.

It wasn't until this week that I looked back and thought - "hang on a minute... I said... that..."

"That" being: you're manipulative, you're blind, I know it, you don't, there it is, that's all.

That. That thing I never quite said before. I said it to him.

That thing that would have changed everything fifteen years ago, if I'd had the balls or whatever. I said that thing. And I didn't even notice for a few days.

It wouldn't have actually changed everything, of course. Life would still have been a lot of blood and thunder, trying to get away from them. But I believed that it would have, at the time, as much and as magically as I've believed anything in this life.

Though I never did say it. Or if I did it just went bad, like moldy bread.

And it doesn't change something now. He can't take it in or wonder if there was something there he really ought to hear. The next time he emails to "hope to convey my best wishes for happiness for u at every moment of life", he'll still be commiserating about the inevitability of karma. I'll ignore most of it, of course. Nothing I can do with it. I can follow the trail of breadcrumbs of his belief back, but there's no little house at the end of the trail. Just a bad smell, and a clearing, and the empty sky.

It's been overcast in New York. It's spring, amazingly enough: God didn't just flip the switch that goes from winter to summer this time. I've finally got back to some Wing Tsun, which is straight-up kung fu training, after being away from it for the two-odd years I've been in New York. I wanna dig out my juggling bags when it gets a little warmer and go busking in the subway. And I want more movement work to get into. Not just yoga and WT, but clowning, stage combat, something of the like. Just putting that out there.